5/26/15

Chau Huynh's first solo in Seattle

Personalizing Vietnam: Wisdom of Time

Chau Huynh

Tobya Art Gallery is pleased to present Chau Huynh a Vietnamese American painter currently residing and working in Seattle, Washington. Chau is a contemporary artist who holds an MFA from University of California, Davis. Her art, as she said is “about revealing, speaking-up and finding healing”.

Her work is powerful and invigorating and have a transcending effect that surpasses the aesthetic aspect we may try to find in it. "Personalizing Vietnam: Wisdom of Time" is a body Chau's work that tales the “untold and unspoken" and boils out the truth to the surface.

In her paintings, Chau used lines, colors and forms to depict her narrative, which visually resemble radiological snapshots of moments. For example, her work “Bomb 52 Project: Infiltration (I), 84 inch by 54 inch, 2014” is a done on collage of paper thickened by repetitions of a pasting of layers one after another. She purposefully selected and left narrow spaces that forms geometric shapes on the black background. While the overall space of this painting is divided by a horizontal line, the top and lower parts are further divided and sub divided by intentionally unfilled, untouched, but in some cases filled with blue, orange, brown, gray, yellow and red narrow spaces. The other aspect of this painting, “Bomb 52 Project: Infiltration (I)”, is the writings the artist incorporated on selected parts of these narrow spaces. The filled and the unfilled, the colored the uncolored, the written-on and unwritten-on, every section of the painting is part of the narrative, historical and or personal, the artist tells. As Chau stated, the narrative is about “re-experiencing the past, learning from it, finding meaning, finding a healing and moving on."